Papers for
agricultural planners
Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.
Agricultural system integrates AI and data to plan soil restoration
Integrating Domain Adaptation and Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Saline-Alkali Land Reclamation Planning
Abstract: Reclamation of saline-alkali land requires management plans that account for soil and water conditions, treatment evidence, and financial constraints. This study develops Wenyao, an agricultural decision-support system integrating domain adaptation with retrieval-augmented generation. A bilingual corpus of 8,664 research papers was processed using a 110-indicator schema to construct SA-Bench, comprising 4,860 paper-level planning instances. A QwQ-32B model was adapted through low-rank supervised fine-tuning and combined with case retrieval for budget-conditioned planning. Evidence extraction achieved an F1-score of 0.83 on 300 expert-annotated papers. Without retrieval, Wenyao achieved 95.83% accuracy on 936 source-disjoint multiple-choice questions, compared with 87.93% for the strongest general-purpose baseline; removing explanatory supervision reduced accuracy to 89.42%. Matched-evidence comparisons across 69 region-budget cases supported complementary contributions from adaptation and retrieval. In a blind assessment by 31 experts, Wenyao with retrieval obtained the highest mean scores for objectives and projected outcomes, whereas GPT-5 scored highest for cost estimates. These findings support literature-informed reclamation planning with professional review, while ongoing field monitoring will assess soil and crop responses.
Machine learning predicts best maize land with high accuracy
Mathematical Formulation and Comparative Performance Evaluation of Machine Learning Algorithms for Maize Land Suitability Prediction
Abstract: Addressing the food needs of a growing population is one of the major challenges of developing countries like Ethiopia. Various policies aimed at increasing food production have been enacted by governments and development partners. Although efforts in this regard have been made, there is still inadequate emphasis on increasing food production through the use of high technology practices. Precision agriculture using technology has been utilized to increase crop yield. Precision agriculture also relies on identifying land for a crop, which is a key factor that affects crop yield. Traditional methods of assessing land suitability for crop production are time-consuming, costly and unreliable. Against this background, the aim of this study was to assess the potential of machine learning (ML) in improving the speed and accuracy of assessing land suitability for maize, a staple crop in Ethiopia, as compared to traditional methods. The study is investigated in three areas (Burie, Shindi and Tilili) in the Amhara region. Data collection was done through the local agriculture offices and survey teams. The data were coded, scaled and balanced. Various feature extraction techniques, which included Univariate Feature Selection(UFS), Recursive Feature Elimination with Cross-Validation(RFECV) and Sequential Feature Selection(SFS), and various classifiers, which were K-nearest neighbor (KNN), gradient boosting (GB),random forest (RF) with mathematical formulations were employed. The best models were constructed through combining GBOOST and SFS and achieved an accuracy of 99.41% and 99.35% for both precision and recall. Our results showed that using machine learning is a reliable method of assessing land suitability for maize in Ethiopia. Keywords: Maize, Gradient boosting,Land suitability,Machine learning, Mathematical formulations